♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein and we're in conversation today with Jonathan Alter, a filmmaker, an award-winning writer, and a political analysis.

Uh, we're gonna talk today about his new book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

Jonathan, thank you very much for coming today.

ALTER: Glad to be here, David.

RUBENSTEIN: So, I should disclose to everybody who may not know that I did work for Carter in the White House for four years so I got to know him during those years reasonably well.

But Jonathan, why do you think it is that after 40 years, he's been out of the White House for 40 hears, nobody really has written a definitive biography of his entire life, why do you think that is?

ALTER: You know, I don't have an easy answer to that question.

People forget that, uh, Jimmy Carter at one point had been really cool.

Uh, you know, uh, I-I put an Andy Warhol image of him on the cover of the book in part to remind people of that, that in 1976, he's friends with Hunter Thompson who helps make him president, he's friends with Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers and, and, uh, he's cool, but by the time he leaves office he's deeply uncool.

And, the Democratic party shunned him and then he started to make his way back, uh, you know, with the good deeds of his post-presidency.

So, I saw this big opening, David, in the line of scrimmage.

I-I was really excited about it.

It's like, "Wow!

I can be the first one, you know, there's, there's like six biographies of Sylvia Plath and none of Jimmy Carter!"

You know?

So, it's crazy!

There's six biographies of Ted Kennedy, none of Jimmy Carter.

So I, I was really excited at the opportunity to, to do this.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so, uh, did Carter cooperate with you?

Did you meet with him?

How many years did you spend working on the book?

And he gave you access I, it looks like from reading the book too, and very private letters, some of his love letters for example.

Uh, were you surprised to get that kind of access?

ALTER: Um, well, uh, it, I-I was a little bit surprised.

So I-I interviewed him, at his home in Plains in Atlanta.

I built a house, uh, in Memphis for Habitat for Humanity with the Carters.

I had several meals with them.

Uh, I inter, I interviewed him when I went with him to Annapolis for his 70th college reunion.

Uh, so in all I did about a dozen interviews.

And then, as far as the love letters go, and they were, they are without question the steamiest, uh, love letters, uh, between a president and first lady in American history.

Those were given to me by Rosalynn Carter.

They were in her possession.

And as Amy Carter told me, she took them with her every move they made, she always had them nearby.

So it was, I was really, uh, I-I guess honored that partway through the process she trusted me enough to let me be, uh, the first person outside the family who had ever seen those letters.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about Rosalynn for a moment, uh, Jimmy Carter, uh, has been married to her for more than 75 years, the longest presidential marriage.

But you point out in your book that there was maybe one or maybe two occasions where they actually thought of divorcing.

ALTER: So, in the interest of being an accurate historian, it's actually 74 years, um... RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ALTER: But, what's interesting about them is they've known each other for 93 years because, uh, uh, Rosalynn, uh, was delivered by Lillian Carter, Jimmy's mother who was a nurse.

Uh, and a couple of days after the baby was born, um, Miss Lillian, as she was called, brought along her not yet three year old son, uh, to see the new baby.

And then, um, later, uh, Rosalynn was friends with, uh, Ruth Carter, Jimmy's younger sister, and they didn't start going out until he was in the Navy, um, but they've had, uh, an astonishing partnership.

Um, and like any long marriage they've had ups and downs.

I-I don't think they ever truly came close to getting divorced just because they don't really believe in divorce, ALTER: But mostly, David, they have had a hugely successful political and, uh, personal partnership.

Not only was she sitting in on Cabinet meetings, not only was she the first First Lady who was ever a diplomat, but she was, uh, an extraordinarily important political advisor, in part because she had much better political judgment than her husband did, and he probably should have listened to her more when he was president.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's go back to his, uh, birth.

Where was he born?

ALTER: Uh, he was born in Plains, Georgia.

But he was raised outside of Plains, uh, on a farm in Archery, Georgia, um, and he, uh, you know, I think people know his father was a, uh, segregationist.

His mother, um, uh, was also, because of the system they were living in, she also abided by a lot of Jim Crow but she took care of black patients, uh, for free.

She brought Jimmy with her to the black church on occasion.

And then he really had a third parent, an illiterate black woman farmhand named Rachel Clark who gave him a lot of his faith in God and, and appreciation of nature.

RUBENSTEIN: So what propelled him to wanna go to the Naval Academy and was it hard for him to get in?

ALTER: Um, so he, his uncle, Tom Gordy was in the Navy, hadn't gone to the Naval Academy, but he would send him letters, postcards, scrimshaw, from all over the world and it fired Jimmy's imagination to get out of, of Georgia and see the world.

And, uh, then, uh, his father tried to intervene with the local Congressmen who was in charge of making appointments to the service academy.

And at first this Congressman said, "No, he hasn't been well enough prepared."

So Jimmy went for a year to Georgia Southwestern, which is in Americus, close to his home, and then the Congressmen said again, "Still not enough math and science."

So he went to Georgia Tech for a year, which Jimmy said was the hardest college he attended.

Uh, and then he, he got into the Naval Academy, uh, I obtained the diary that he kept his plebe year, his first year at the Naval Academy, and it's actually a harrowing story.

The hazing was beyond belief.

Uh, and then later when he was, uh, a senior, uh, he was on the cross-country team with, um, uh, the first black midshipman and Carter protected him from hazing, and it was an early indication that Carter, uh, had, um, more enlightened views on race than his family did.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when Carter graduates he marries Rosalynn shortly thereafter, and he begins a Naval career and eventually he goes to work for the famous Admiral Rickover.

ALTER: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, why did he wanna work for Admiral Rickover, and what did he actually do with Rickover?

ALTER: So, nuclear submarines were the most exciting thing going on in mid-century America.

Uh, so this was the most elite program in the Navy.

He'd already done well as a submariner.

It was extremely hard to get hired by Admiral Rickover, who Carter believes with some reason was the greatest engineer who ever lived.

Remember at that time they didn't even have nuclear power plants on land and Rickover was attaching a nuclear power plant to a submarine, and it, Carter worked on the prototype, the Seawolf.

It, it, they ended up not using that prototype, they used a different prototype, but he was right in the thick of this enormously exciting project.

So Carter, um, he, he has this interview.

Rickover says, "Where'd you stand in your class at Annapolis?"

He says, "59th out of a class of 850," and Rickover says, "Did you do your best?"

And Carter says, "Well, not always."

And Rickover turns around his chair, the interview's over, he says, "Why not?"

And so Carter entitled his campaign, little campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?

Uh, he, uh, praised to do his best.

His Nobel Peace Prize citation is all about doing his best.

That's why I entitled the book His Very Best because ever since that day he, everything he does, he's all in.

And then this was really new to me, and I had to dig deep into recently declassified Canadian nuclear records, uh, in 1952 there was a meltdown, full meltdown in an experimental nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario.

And the word went out to the Americans, what do we do?

This was at the beginning of the nuclear age.

There had never been a nuclear accident.

And Rickover sent Carter with a team and they could only go in for 90 seconds, radioactive waters all over the containment facility, to try to turn some valves and, and stop the meltdown.

Uh, and, uh, it was, uh, you know, really hairy.

Um, and almost like going into battle for, for 90 seconds.

Um, and again one of many parts of his life that, uh, little if anything had been written about.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, he's in the Navy for about a dozen years, and then, uh, his father dies, the family says you have to come back and run the family business.

Gets back, and gets involved in politics, runs for the state senate and eventually wins.

And then he runs for governor in 1966 against Lester Maddox, a very well known, I would say, segregationist, and Carter lost.

What propelled him to say, "I'm gonna run again in 1970"?

ALTER: First he had a, uh, a depression, uh, and a crisis of faith and then he was born again in, in, uh, in 1967, '68.

They had Amy in 1967.

He goes on, uh, Baptist missions in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, going door to door for Jesus.

And what he decides is that the best way that he can serve God is to be the, the, you know, to serve what he thought of as a large congregation, a constituency.

And so he runs again in 1970, but this time, and this was really, uh, I think the low point of his whole career, um, he's running against a popular former governor named Carl Sanders, and Sanders has the Atlanta, uh, moderates, progressives, you know, more liberal people in the Atlanta area.

So to win Carter has to carry, uh, all the rural counties.

And so, he runs to the right and he actually runs kind of a dog whistle campaign.

He doesn't say anything explicitly racist but he embraces George Wallace, he pays a call on the founder of the White Citizens' Council, and he signals to those voters that he's one of them.

And then immediately upon taking the oath at the beginning of his inaugural address, he says something that shocks the, all of Georgia and lands him on the front page of the New York Times which was, "The time for racial discrimination is over."

Now we might think that's not a big deal but in 1971 in Georgia it was a huge deal, the, the Conservatives felt he had betrayed them.

The black Georgians who were at the inaugural address were amazed, they couldn't believe he had said this.

And then he made good on it by being a progressive governor.

RUBENSTEIN: So in Georgia in those days you could only serve one, uh, term consecutively... ALTER: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: So he's elected governor in '70, has to give it up in '74, what made him think that a southern governor in the 1970s, um, serving only one term, could be elected President of the United States?

Wasn't that fairly audacious?

ALTER: Yeah, I would say so.

I mean, one of his people said it was like picking a president out of the phone book.

He was at 0% in the polls.

I think the confidence to do it came from hosting senators who were candidates or possible candidates in 1972 at the mansion in Atlanta, uh, the governor's mansion, and he realized, "These guys are no smarter than I am, maybe they're not as smart as I am," and he felt that because as governor he saw where the rubber met the road in government, that he had an advantage over senators.

And they started planning this in 1972, the night after Nixon won his landslide victory, they're already planning the 1976 campaign.

He had a brilliant strategist, Hamilton Jordan, who, uh, outlined where the whole thing would go.

He caught a wave as I mentioned, uh, with Watergate, and then he ran a, a quite brilliant campaign, basically invented the Iowa caucuses.

And, uh, and, and mastered, uh, the retail politics that are so important in primary states.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he gets elected in 1976 and does he say, "I don't really know much about Washington so I'm gonna bring in a lot of experienced Washington hands to kind of run my White House staff," or what does he do?

ALTER: He doesn't do that.

He surrounds himself with the Georgia Mafia.

Um, but they make a number of unforced errors early on, uh, that got a lot of publicity.

Um, probably the most serious one, uh, was, legislatively was Carter who, um, in Georgia they called him "“Jungle Jimmy"”.

You know, we don't think of Jimmy Carter that way but very sharp elbows, uh, sometimes cold in his relationship with key legislators, uh, didn't have, uh, a lot of time for people who weren't interested in the merits of an issue, and so, word kinda got around Washington that he could be difficult to deal with, but I think there's been a lot of misunderstanding about the first half of the Carter presidency.

In 1977, he was as high as 73% approval rating.

In, in 1979, he was as low as 26%.

So, there were these fluctuations that are hard for us to get our arms around now, and he had a number of successes in the first half of his presidency.

Then he was swamped by events, swamped by a bad economy, which was partly, um, you know, his doing because he appointed Paul Volcker, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Got Reagan elected in 1980, reelected in '84.

I interviewed Volcker not long before he died, and he said, you know, there's some truth to that and-and then he, he went and, uh, on a fishing trip he, he apologized to Carter for basically costing him the 1980 election.

He jacked up interest rates over 15%.

Can you imagine going into a presidential election with, with interest rates at that level?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, there are three things I think that kept him from getting reelected in, in addition to the, uh, recession and in addition to the high interest rates.

Why did he allow the Shah to come into the United States, and why did he spend a year trying to get the hostages out when it seemed like, to many people, that wasn't really gonna be productive?

ALTER: So, he got kinda blindsided by the Iranian Revolution which was one of the most important developments of the 20th century, comparable in some ways to the Russian Revolution.

Then, um, and this completely fascinated me.

There was something called "“Project Eagle"” and the Rockefeller's, they were determined with the help of Kissinger and others to get the Shah into the United States, uh, because he had been such a close ally and Carter's initial reaction was, "F the Shah," And for the longest time, he would not let him in.

Then in the greatest mistake of his presidency, he got hoodwinked.

Literally the wool pulled over his eyes.

These Rockefeller folks convinced the State Department that the Shah could not be treated for his cancer in Mexico, which was not true!

And so they let him in, he was treated in New York Hospital, and just days later the hostages were seized in Iran.

After that period, first there was this rally around the flag, Carter's number go way up.

But then he's not very imaginative in the way he confronts this crisis and he sort of lets himself be held hostage.

And he knows that if he attacked Iran he could probably win the election, but the hostages would be killed and saving lives and peace was always uppermost for Jimmy Carter.

So he, he really gets his chain yanked by the Ayatollah for a long time and then is unable to get them out before the election for reasons, and this has not been completely substantiated, but there's some very interesting new evidence about it.

There, there are real indications that, uh, Bill Casey of the Reagan Campaign was in touch with the Iranians before the election to delay the release until after the election.

So, uh, you know, that really hurt him.

Then what happened David is that the hostages were seized on November 4th, 1979.

Election day was November 4th, 1980.

So in the days leading up to the election the news magazines, the networks, they all did these one, one-year anniversary stories.

So the last image that Americans had before they went to the polls was a guy with a blindfold on, right?

All these stories about the hostages not being released were again brought front and center.

And if they hadn't, Carter still would've lost but I don't think it would've been the same kind of landslide if, if Volcker hadn't jacked up interest rates and, and Carter, uh, uh, had, uh, you-you, it hadn't been reminded of, uh, his ineptitude with the hostage... RUBENSTEIN: A second factor was that, uh, that Ted Kennedy ran against him... ALTER: Yes.

Huge factor.

RUBENSTEIN: Does Carter think that had Ted Kennedy not run against him for the Democratic nomination, and he almost got the nomination, does he think he would've been reelected if Kennedy hadn't done that?

ALTER: So, Carter's short answer when we discussed it is as if, "I had one more helicopter."

He was talking about the Iran, uh, rescue mission which was a fiasco at Desert One in April of 1980.

Um, I-I don't agree with Carter's analysis on that.

I think even if they had gotten the hostages out, he still would've lost because of the economy and because he did not have a unified Democratic party, and he mismanaged his relationship with Ted Kennedy.

And when I asked Carter what his biggest mistake as president was, he did not say letting the Shah in, he said not handling my relationships inside the Democratic party better.

And I think that, you know, he, Carter's very accountable.

This is one of the interesting things about him.

So in 1980, shortly before the convention, Dan Rather interviewed him on 60 Minutes the night before the convention opened and Carter was dumb enough to give himself grades.

And so he said, "Well, I'll give myself a C+ on this, a B minus on that."

I mean, his aides were appalled that he would assess himself so candidly in the middle of a presidential campaign.

RUBENSTEIN: And, and a third factor I think some people might say is he underestimated, uh, Ronald Reagan as a very compelling candidate.

Would you agree, uh, or would Carter agree that that was a factor, underestimating Ronald Reagan?

ALTER: No, I-I don't think Carter would agree with that, in fact I know he doesn't agree with that.

And he actually, when he was told, uh, in January that Reagan had won the, uh, uh, New Hampshire primary on the Republican side he knew that as a politician he was gonna get outclassed by, by Reagan.

He, he didn't communicate as well as Reagan.

And then, uh, I, you know I, he didn't fully realize when they had their first debate that, that it was their only debate, that it was over but he, on some level he, he understood that, uh, once Reagan cleared that bar and didn't seem like a crazy cowboy, that he was in deep trouble.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Jimmy Carter, I've heard, I have never asked him about this, hates the idea that he was an unsuccessful president but a very successful former president.

Um, does he really hate that idea when people mention that?

ALTER: Uh, well I think, he resents this idea that he had a failed presidency.

And I think he's, he's right to to resent it because he was a political failure but a substantive success in many, many areas.

Carter was both made and unmade by Watergate.

Uh, the, he, his timing was perfect, his message in 1976 was perfect, returning honesty to government, a moral appeal after Nixon, "I'll never lie to you."

Um, and he got what he considered to be a better press than he deserved, uh, in 1976.

But then immediately when he gets to the White House as, as Jody Powell, his Press Secretary put it, "We didn't even... We didn't have a, a honeymoon, we didn't even have a one-night stand."

And as I researched it I-I noticed that that was right.

So the, the press was so convinced that after, you know, LBJ and Nixon, Carter ran against Ford, but the stench was still there.

They were so convinced that the president was dishonest, hiding something, scandal ridden.

So that, that tended to really erode his credibility and, and when all of these bills would go through Congress, and there was a bill signing every couple of weeks, you know, his legislative record, in part because like he had a Democratic Congress for four years and Clinton and Obama only had one for two, a lot of points on the board, but the press didn't really care.

Whether its fuel economy standards, the first toxic waste cleanup, uh, really important, uh, uh, regulations on air and water pollution, uh, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation that he signed, the press barely noticed.

So, after he left office people said, you know, he had failed and his reaction was, "I didn't!

I did a lot to prepare the United States for the future.

I had a bad economy, uh, you know, I didn't bring the hostages home, but the overall record is much better than people realized," and I think President Carter's correct about that.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, your book, uh, pretty much stops at, uh, uh, his, the presidency, you know, and the 40 years after the presidency, uh, you really haven't, you didn't spend that much time on that.

I assume that was very conscious.

Uh, what was the reason you didn't wanna write that much about all the things he's done since he left office?

ALTER: My feeling on that was, uh, twofold.

Uh, uh, a historian named Douglas Brinkley wrote a thick book that is just about his post-presidency till the mid-90's I think.

So, you know, I-I felt there was more, uh, uncharted territory earlier.

Um, but also, um, I-I was intentionally trying to say to the reader, "This, this cliché that you have in mind is wrong," and I was trying to flip it a little bit.

So I-I believe that his presidency was underrated, as I indicated, his post-presidency was a little overrated.

And the reason that I think that is that he didn't have the levers of power that you have when you're president.

You, you can just get, even if you help eradicate Guinea worm disease and monitor elections, that's not really all that significant compared to establishing the most important bilateral relationship in the world by establishing full diplomatic relations with China.

Preventing a war in Central American that the Joint Chiefs said would require 100,000 troops in perpetuity by getting the Panama Canal treaties ratified.

Camp David.

Setting an, a new global standard for the first time about how governments should treat their own people with his Human Rights Policy, which was hypocritical in many respects but enormously important in, in ending the Cold War, as a lot of conservatives now acknowledge.

And then the other factor David is that his post-presidency has been marred by the occasional ego trip.

So, after he did a good job with Colin Powell and Sam Nunn, uh, preventing a war in Haiti in 1994 and arguably a good job, uh, preventing a war in North Korea, he chose to go on CNN before he reported to President Clinton.

You could understand why he's had these fraught relationships with some his successors because he, um, he acts like what I call a "“freelance Secretary of State"” and no president wants that.

RUBENSTEIN: So, I thought I knew a lot about Jimmy Carter 'cause I worked in the White House, as I mentioned, for four years.

I learned a lot of things I didn't know in your book, I really enjoyed it.

Jonathan I wanna thank you for a very interesting conversation about your book, uh, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

ALTER: Thanks, David.

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